ThinkProgress has a leaked copy of a telcoms industry PowerPoint presentation laying out their plans to use astroturf to kill Network Neutrality. The industry is hiring the same turfers who work with the Tea Party movement to carry their message to the people.

What the telcos want to do is reduce your access to websites and services unless those services have paid a bribe for "premium carriage" to you. So Google buys its bandwidth from its ISP. You buy your bandwidth from your ISP. Then your ISP goes to Google and says, "If you want to send your bits to our customers when they ask for them, you'll have to pay us too." If Google doesn't pay, the ISP slows down its bits when you ask for them.

They call this "free and unregulated internet access for content flow and connectivity speed free and unregulated internet access for content flow and connectivity speed."

Here's how I see it: the telcos and cable operators got a huge public subsidy when we agreed to let them use our public sewers, tunnels and streets (not to mention our houses and basements) for their wires. We give them all this for free or far below the market costs. They put their wires in our dirt.

Now they're saying they don't want to give us the service we want. Literally. That's what fighting Net Neutrality is about: it's ISPs fighting for the right to slow down or discard the bits you, the customer, ask for.

I say, it's our dirt, so we make the rules. If they don't like those rules, let them get their goddamned wires out of our dirt, off our streets, out of our basements. Let's give them 60 days, and if they haven't pulled up their wires by then, we'll buy them for the scrappage price of the copper. Then we'll turn over those wires to companies that are willing to give us the bits we want in exchange for the billions (trillions?) worth of public subsidy these greedy corporate welfare bums are currently enjoying.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say, "Congress shall give away the public's priceless assets to companies and then sit around sucking its collective thumb while the companies screw the public." If AT&T and Comcast don't want to give us the service we want, let them buy every inch of conduit and right-of-way at market prices. Until then, they can STFU and give us the network we demand.

This morning, representatives from various front groups launched a new coordinated campaign to kill net neutrality. Speaking on Capitol Hill, these front groups took turns decrying the evils of the principle of a fair and unbiased Internet. LULACHispanic Leadership Fund, which is funded by AT&T, called Net Neutrality "Obamacare for the Internet." Americans for Prosperity -- a corporate front group founded by oil billionaire David Koch but also funded by telecom interests -- unveiled a new ad smearing net neutrality as a "government takeover" (the initial ad buy is $1.4 million dollars). And Grover Norquist, representing his "Americans for Tax Reform" corporate front group, said net neutrality is like what China does, "putting policemen on every corner, on the street or on the Internet."

Update:
Simon sez, "On its Think Progress blog, the liberal advocacy group announced it had "obtained" a PowerPoint document "which reveals how the telecom industry is orchestrating the latest campaign against Net neutrality" through a pseudo-grassroots effort. The story was echoed on Slashdot, Boing Boing, and innumerable pro-regulation blogs.
There's just one problem with Think Progress' claim: It's not, well, accurate.
In a case of truth being stranger than astroturf, it turns out that the PowerPoint document was prepared as a class project for a competition in Florida last month. It cost the six students a grand total of $173.95, including $18 for clip art."

The Telcos are like Luddites, determined to keep us in the dark ages. And they keep getting away with it. They have become the most reactionary force against any change in the US. And they keep doing it with no real challenge to their damaging behavior.

This is what frustrated me about the National Broadband Plan and (in part) about the FCC’s third-way approach on broadband regulation. Neither addresses incumbent control over wires or fiber as a competitive problem.

We could have 100 Mbps Internet at something close to South Korean prices if Congress, the FCC, and the courts didn’t separately make it impossible in the late 1990s into 2002 to force incumbents to provide wireline access at nondiscriminatory wholesale prices. The four national competitive DSL providers all died (Covad was reborn) because of the clusterfuckage around the issue.

Cory, you don’t go far enough in condemning the cheap sale of rights of way and other resources: telcos, at least, got on the order of billions of dollars over the last two decades in a combination of direct subsidy, tax abatement, and other state and federal forms to provide universal access that was never fully (or nearly) built.

The fact is that the telcos could be producing huge profits, there could be vastly faster networks, and we could all be paying less. That would all have been possible. It didn’t have to be socialism; it’s not socialism in any of the countries in which there are robust competitive high-speed markets facilitated by a level-playing field made by the government (often in the wake of PTT monopoly nonsense).

In the UK, BT was forced to split its DSL infrastructure division from its retail service. The DSL part has now brought service to what I think Ofcom (the UK regulator) pegs at 99 percent of the UK population, which includes places like the Orkneys and distant Wales and Scotland and rural England. Ofcom doesn’t classify “256 Kbps in either direction” as broadband like the FCC still does; I believe it’s a minimum 2 Mbps down, and moving higher.

As I understand it, 8 Mbps/1 Mbps ADSL is often *thrown in* to a mobile plan or satellite TV package in Great Britain. It’s just that cheap to offer.

I like a good a good QoS (aka Quality of Service) arrangement, but not when it’s just being done as a cash-grab.

As long as ISPs want to charge both ends of the line for preferential service, they can darn well shove their Net Brutality where the sun don’t shine. I like that term, we’re appropriating it and the ISPs can’t have it. Nyah nyah.

Seriously, is there any telecom company more evil than ATT? First they spy on us with their secret surveillance rooms, then they lobby (successfully) for retroactive immunity, then they cripple Android phones, now this. (Plus they won’t stop sending me shit in the mail trying to get me to switch to them even though they said they would.)

These assclowns have to be reminded that the Internet is a TAXPAYER-funded technology and that they’re using TAXPAYER-subsidized hardware to deliver it to us.

Abusive fuckwad ISPs making craploads of money off of OUR technology need a serious regulatory beatdown.

I like #1’s call for “Network Neutrality, Not Network Brutality”. We should be sure to use it. Thanks for that, dipshits.

There’s something you seem to be forgetting(or don’t know- I don’t know your technical level): Routing is destination-based, not source-based. You are not paying your ISP to *reach* websites. You are paying your ISP to deliver data from websites to you. and if you pay for an 8Mbps connection, your ISP has the obligation of delivering that 8Mbps to you regardless of the source they came from.youtube is not bombarding you with bits – they send data to you UPON REQUEST. As long as you pay for x amount of bandwidth, it’s not the telcos business where you consume that bandwidth from.

Imagine it this way – Youtube has come up with a way of shipping stuff to customers without paying for road registration. Very cool. Now imagine 20% of the trucks ont he roads are Youtube Trucks. Not so cool, you’re paying for the roads, and the increase in size necessary to avoid traffic jams.

All that aside, My arguement for Net Neutralility is that I pay for my Internet, that should be enough… But is it?

because I pay my ISP, but they don’t peer with Youtube, they peer with someone else, who also has to upgrade their networks to carry youtube to me, but they don’t get any increase in subscribers for it.

It’s not a problem outside of the states, because everyone out here on the fringe of the web pays for all the traffic back to the core of the web so we don’t care where it comes from…

Net neutrality, shrouded in a populist cry for freedom, is the first step toward greater government control over the internet that, ironically, would limit consumer access. Regulating the pipes could chase away investors otherwise willing to build the networks of the future.

You can find their support of the tea baggers movie on the homepage, of course:

The Tea Party comment in the article is just another propaganda smear about people who are fed up with our overspending, taking us to the brink of Greece and possibly beyond Federal Government. If you don’t think that warning people of their impending demise unless we bail out huge banks, all the while the the goverment is spending like drunken sailors doesn’t get average hard working Americans riled up, you are crazy. The Tea Party comment reminds me of Joseph Goebbels lowest common denominator propaganda theories being practiced by leftists like MSNBC on a daily basis. They’ll tell you the Tea Party people are racists everyday until you believe it. Alas, net neutrality is something that a Tea Party person would support. Just show them the two minute Google made video on net neutrality. Then explain to them what Comcast did with bit torrent traffic, namely putting a 1 in the reset TCP header field for BT traffic. Yeah Tea Party people are all for government waste and inefficiency and most especially for greedy corporate behemoths controlling what you can and cannot do on the web.

While I’m sure that there are some intelligent, thoughtful people in the Tea Party movement who can and do think for themselves, the self-righteous assclowns who repeat whatever drivel they’re fed outnumber them by at least 3:1 (by my observation). I have a couple of those types as FB friends and they are constantly repeating the telecos’ misrepresentations as if they were their own considered opinions and posting (in all caps, natch) about how the eeeeeebul gub’mint wants to take away all of your rights, and if we let the Corporations do as they please, we’ll all be better off. This in spite of the Corporations repeated demonstrations that it just ain’t so.

Some years ago I worked for BellSouth as a “Multimedia Technician” a.k.a. MT or “supertech” – one of the 180 or so people who had access to every database, DSLAM and switch and authorized to give orders to any field and central office technician in order to fix ADSL and related ATM/PPPoE circuits. What I learned is that one shouldn’t trust the telcom management at all.

Most ADSL circuits from 1999 on could operate at 4x the regular 1.5 Mbps downstream bandwidth just by changing a single configuration setting – and the ATM network that served them could handle that and 10x more – but no such speeds were authorized by management. It wouldn’t have cost anything more, but they wouldn’t even sell such 6 Mbps circuits at any price.

On the other hand, we weren’t allowed to fix unreliable long lines, for example by limiting the nominal bandwidth to provide more usable bandwidth. Nor were we allowed to use different modulation profiles to improve reliability.

One of the handful of “tech support” MTs (net.gods) told me in 2002 about a service call he had made (before he became an MT around 2000) to the secret FBI listing post in one of the BellSouth buildings in downtown Atlanta. He said there was absolutely nothing and no one to prevent them from listening to or accessing anything they wanted.

Most relevant to the net-neutrality issue is the way that the ATM switches changed in 2003-2004. While ATM has all sorts of settings that allow circuits to be given priority, these settings are never used, and don’t matter anyway unless the physical link is overloaded, which also never happens. However, new switches, starting with the Lucent BSN5000 series could do “deep packet inspection” – looking past all the different layers of encapsulated protocols in real time to the user data inside and running secret and unfixable rules that decided when to drop cells, frames, or packets or even to change the user data inside – and who knows what else? (maybe statistics, maybe copying data to spies?) Circuits were no longer pipes which passed data unaltered, and some problems occasionally arose from the deep-packet-munging that were literally unfixable, even for the 3 or 4 guys who really knew how to use a protocol analyzer.

Around the same time the company started to do time-and-motion studies and six-sigma bullshit which attempted to replace the expertise needed to fix perhaps the most complex artifact humans had ever produced to a short checklist. Not a flowchart – a checklist. The order provisioning flowchart alone was eight square feet of flyspeck-3 with several dozen systems each representing millions of lines of code, and the %*@! Accenture six-sigma consultants reduced fixing all possible problems with something several times that complex to a checklist. With call-time and 20 other mis-metrics and a morning team huddle (it’s really just a call center, right?). Not long after, they were screwed up enough to be reassimilated into the AT&T borg.

Threaten to seize the lines. Hold their feet to the fire. Investigate and audit their supplier relationships and prevent them from screwing the little ISPs with their self-written regulations and tariffs.

They say the content providers are “clogging their pipes”. But who ACTUALLY use the pipes are the consumers that request the bits. Consumers are already paying to use the pipes. Now consumers will have to pay to USE the service twice.

ISPs want to charge for the content AND the pipes. But they don’t produce anything. They simply want to apply the CABLE model on the Internet. But what we can’t forget is that on the internet world, the content is FREE.

I struggle all the time to get people to care about this issue, but I’m afraid it comes off as too techy.

Maybe there’s a more concrete analogy we could use? I mean, everyone understands roads, right? Imagine that the government turned the nation’s roads over to private businesses, then gave those private businesses the power to determine which cars you could drive on the road, AND the power to tell you where you can go–unless, of course, everyone involved paid the appropriate fee. There would be mass hysteria!

But do the same thing with the Internet (give the private “owners” of publicly-funded infrastructure power over where you go and how you get there), and all you get is a yawn–though most people probably spend at least as much time on the Internet as they do on the road.

“I struggle all the time to get people to care about this issue, but I’m afraid it comes off as too techy.”

The solution is to equate net neutrality with privacy. Tell people that, if net neutrality is defeated, everything they do online will be watched by AT&T and friends. That is what deep packet inspection and throttling amount to, in the first instance at least. I ask people if they like the idea of their service provider monitoring everything they do online. EVERYTHING! That’s pretty easy to understand, and appropriately repellent. Remind people that even private-browsing/porn mode starts with a warning that AT&T and their telecom friends can still see what the browser is doing. Tell people that without legally binding net-neutrality, telecoms will be watching their online activities all the time. Leverage people’s desire for privacy. When internet users hear this they usually get the idea, especially those who enjoy ‘private browsing’…

Right now everyone, (you, me, Google, Amazon) pays to get on the internet. Think of it as a toll to get on the information superhighway. We all pay the toll and we all drive together at the same speed.

Broadband companies like Verizon and AT&T would like to create separate speed controlled lanes on the information superhighway: Their own content and services would be delivered using the fastest lane; companies like Google and Amazon would be charged a second toll to travel in the middle lane; and every other website would be relegated to the slow lane. That would be dangerous for innovators, small businesses and nonprofits – but beneficial to the telecom and media companies who want to be able to sell their own movies, music and television shows at the fastest speeds while they slow you down if you surf over to a competitor’s site. Basically it’s just a scheme to charge twice for the same service while simultaneously crushing their competitors with the monopoly we gave them.

It would also radically change our experience of the Internet as our link to democratic discourse and our window onto the world of ideas at the whim of a corporation. No company should be blocking or making our access to any web site of our choice more difficult.

Net neutrality legislation would protect the open and democratic nature of the Internet.

#13 – You might want to check your facts. It is a lie that there is content being consumed for which the bandwidth is not paid clogging the internet.

Currently the end user pays for the bandwidth they use to their ISP, plus google or other companies pay for the bandwidth they use to their co-location center of ISP. The bandwidth is already paid for twice, once on each end. The people in the middle get paid by both ends in a peering arrangement.

The USA has some of the slowest speeds and highest Internet prices in the world. These companies are wanting a third payment to provide sub-standard services that have already been paid for twice AND subsidized by public taxpayer money. This is not the situation in other countries with other broadband providers.

So much for grassroots movements. The only way I’ll ever know if its real anymore is if there’s things on fire and teargas in the streets. Unless the figure out how to stage that too. That’d be entertaining.

They’ve set up the perfect frame of argument here. The telecoms bypass the real problem (monopoly control and government subsidization of communications) and get people arguing over Net Neutrality, a.k.a. putting the Wardrobe Malfunction Police in charge of the Internet. Is that really what you want? I mean, really? In 20 years, do we want YouTube to be taken offline because someone posted an offensive video?

The solution to this issue should be obvious – instead of trying to mandate Net Neutrality, we need *actual* net neutrality, which means taking the steps necessary to break down the competitive barriers that prevent people from having choices today and protect the favored positions of the incumbents. The monopoly cable franchises and telco franchises have to go, along with the subsidies and insider access that prevents competition. That’s the real problem. Giving the FCC control over the Internet does not, and cannot, solve that problem – it’s like trying to stop a leak in a dam by putting a sticker that says “Unauthorized Content Prohibited” over the leak.

Heh. Tell google what to do. hahahaha. Google will become a service provider. They’ve already eaten book publishing. I expect in a few years to be pouring google milk over my google cereal. ISPs had better watch out. Not that I think google everything will be good, I just don’t think these ISPs know ‘ @#$!% they are dealing with.

Here’s what the national executive director of LULAC actually said: “Net-neutrality standards should protect against broadband providers engaging in anti-competitive behavior by blocking or inhibiting access to competing Web sites or content.”

We will be facing this is the same problem again and again, now that the Supreme Court has rewritten the Preamble to the Constitution, which now begins, “We the Corporations of the United States of America…”

This article is disinfo…. oh I just saw the update, I read it earlier.. ha.

I am opposed to ‘net-neutrality’.

Microsoft looked scary, the government tried to hurt them for us, but they weren’t really all that scary to begin with.

IBM looked scary in the 70’s… it wasn’t. Telecoms look scary now, but they will respond to market forces when the time comes.

The BIGGEST cost in infrastructure isn’t the fact that we ‘let them use our streets and tunnels’ or whatever… it is the manpower to dig the trenches.

If google gets hurt by TW… Google and someone else can team up and kill big markets that some telecom needs. besides that eventually the manpower will have to be rehired to update the coax or fiber.

The government could potentially hurt the tech development that is required for us to advance speeds and tech by allowing useless competitors to steal market-share.

Monopolies aren’t bad if they are temporary and don’t have the government pro-actively killing their competition. Lines laid by someone are their private property. There isn’t much standing in the way of someone else laying their own lines except money… if the demand arises then people will pay for it.

I understand that the internet is neat, and you are affraid… but don’t let the government try to manage who offers service. Smaller markets in Europe have had some sucesses with their open-access and other versions of neutrality, but the US is also a very unique animal, HUGE rural spans, and there are tons of economic forces that should be considered when comparing apples and oranges of European and US internet connectivity.

Ummmm…Your update is, I assume, based on an article by “draw by crayon libertarian” and “journalist” Declan McCullagh, and Think Progress has a response which demolishes his “story”.

Their points:
* The web administrator and primary author, Kristin McMurray, is employed (i.e. not a student) by an astroturf group.

* Is using a PROFESSIONAL PR SERVICE to track access to her web site.

* The “students” met with representatives of various lobbying groupe.

* Norquist and the other lobbiests have quoted this presentation word for word.

McCullagh has a VERY long history of getting things wrong, and respouting pap from lobbyists and the like whenever someone challenges the idea that the internet sprung fully grown from the forehead of free enterprise.

He created the “Al Gore invented the internet” lie.

What he writes on this subject should NEVER be accepted as accurate until independently verified.

Credit where dredit is due, BTW, the “crayon” description is not mine, it comes from Andrew Orlowsky at the Register.

Running those networks that were subsidized by our taxpayers is very expensive. The current rules that are relative to the network specifically mentioned in this rant maintain equal access to the copper by all licensed telephone company – e.g. DS1 loop, by law, must be priced equally for all parties licensed to use them. The confusion is that the services that ride upon those loops is the part not subsidized by the government. The equipment, switches, trucks, call centers, sales forces, engineers, legal departments and on is paid for by the telco companies as a cost of business.

My point is that we all have equal access to those copper/fiber loops…and everyone pays the same price for those loops – loops being the government subsidized component of the telco companies. The FCC didn’t just give access to the loops, they also ensured access to all the central offices to place equipment to run those loops; thus causing the breakup of a monopoly and allowing for competition in the telecommunications industry.

Since then (1997) the prices of telecommunications has plummeted and allowed for the most magnificent explosion of communication and technology. Bandwidth, the only commodity that matters in telecom, is significantly more available and quality than could have been ever imagined; considering the Internet (as we know it) didn’t exist 15 years ago – we haven’t gone anywhere but up as an industry in quality, capacity and availability.

Here’s the thing. Residential telephony in densely populated areas is not a good business to be in. Mobile telephony is widely available and more commonly replaces a ‘land line’ in the year 2010. People, in those demographics, born after 1995 may live their entire lives without a “home phone line”. Love it or hate it, those are the very lines that we subsidized…those soon to be worthless lines.

Worthless?? Yes. When you consider the cost to maintain that copper and fiber telco infrastructure, it’s staggering. Then, when people don’t pay to use the infrastructure – or, this is important – the ammount those people are willing to pay is less than it costs to maintain the network…then the telco companies that are legally bound to maintain the networks are screwed.

Yeah yeah, screw those guys blah blah blah. Running these puppies isn’t easy, flat out. The incredibly vast infrastructure to maintain a worldwide network is super, super, super expensive. Outages are measure in seconds now. We, as consumers, rightfully have high expectations; those expectations are not easy to meet – at all.

When the subsidized network is a burden, we have to prop it up with taxpayer money…right? Because, someone has to pay for it. We want the bandwidth for cheap or free, no limits…how does that make sense? Who pays for it? I think you are mistaken on the profits side – telco companies are almost frantic to figure out how to survive when all you need is a pipe to the cloud – that doesn’t generate a lot of revenue FYI.

Any fantasies about bandwidth bottlenecking or conspiracy is comical. This point really shows a lack of understanding. The network is measured in milliseconds and is commonly a source of pride among carriers to have that be the smallest amount. So prideful, we pay our customers back when we perform less than our own projected goals. The concept that the telco carriers are coordinated is just too technically disprovable.

You have to understand that for every packet of information on that internet created by a common user – specifically non-business class users – there are billions of packets created by business class users. Those users, the businesses, have stricter requirements and thence pay for a premium class of service…and it is watched c-l-o-s-e-l-y…I assure you, by those customers paying those premium prices.

Residential bandwidth? Come on now, there is no money in it. Cable companies are in the same territory as phone companies; essentially it’s just a pipe and then, turns out, doesn’t make much money. Money keeps the lights on and the circuits flowing…love it or hate it.

So when you think about it, there isn’t a good reason for a company to invest in residential services; least revenue to be gathered and most cost to maintain the infrastructure. Versus business class services who produce much greater revenue and are much more technically experienced; thence, easier to maintain and support.

I am tired of writing now…good luck with your tact on this one; I think it’s a house of cards to anyone who understands the industry.

Sorry, but your arguments sound like you’re completely in the bag for the telcos.

If you eliminate business-to-consumer bandwidth, how many tubes do businesses use? Try as you might to pshaw the profit in consumer usage, the reality is if the internet was basically just for business purposes it would be a tiny market.

The reason there’s massive profit in the internet for telcos is because of consumer usage. Sure, businesses pay for premium service because they want to ensure they can serve their internet customers.

If this is the latest talking point by AT&T’s lobbyists, you can mark it down as FAIL.